Digitise your old audio cassettes
by Nik Rawlinson
What you need: Audio cassettes; cassette player; leads; Audacity software
Time required: 20 minutes for setup; several hours for recording and editing
Cassette tapes are enjoying a renaissance. Popular artists are releasing new albums on the format – alongside downloads, vinyl and streaming – in the knowledge that their most loyal fans will buy one of each to complete their collections. Many will be packed away in a cupboard for safekeeping, never to be played. But what about the cassettes we’ve all hung on to from the past?
Many of these are irreplaceable. They may be albums that are no longer in production, or precious home recordings featuring voices from loved ones who have since passed on. One day you might no longer be able to play them back, because either your only tape player has stopped working or, more worryingly, the cassette itself has worn out, been stretched or snapped. If you want to continue enjoying your cassettes well into the future, it makes sense to create a digital copy today, before it’s too late.
One option is to use a dedicated MP3 recorder. There are many cheap devices to buy on Amazon and other sites. They’re easy to use, with a USB port for a stick and the ability to detect gaps between tracks so they can separate them into individual files. However, we’ve had reports that they don’t work as smoothly as advertised, including several we’ve tested. Therefore, we’re going to show you how to digitise cassettes using a tape recorder at home, a cable that connects it to your PC, and the excellent free audio-editing program Audacity.
1 Set up Audacity
To download Audacity visit www.snipca.com/48262. There are several options to choose from but, unless you have a very old computer, you’ll most likely need ‘64 bit installer (recommended)’.
Click ‘Download .exe’ to the right of this heading and, when the installer has arrived in your Downloads folder, launch it and step through the installation instructions. If you’re still using Windows 7, the most recent compatible version is 2.3.3, which you can download from www.snipca.com/48263.
Launch Audacity, then select your audio source. Start by taking a look at the ports on your computer.
You’ll almost certainly have a headphone socket, which you can ignore for the moment. But you should also have a Line In and/or microphone socket, which you can use to connect your tape player. This will be a 3.5mm jack socket, often
